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Aikido Security vs F5 Advanced WAF comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.9
Companies achieved time and cost savings with Aikido Security, improving efficiency, compliance, and vulnerability management through automation and tool consolidation.
Sentiment score
7.6
F5 Advanced WAF offers ROI by saving time, reducing costs, enhancing security, and ensuring compliance for businesses.
Aikido Security caught a critical remote code execution vulnerability in my Python machine learning pipelines before it reached production.
Product Manager at Zidio development
Since we got rid of that, our productivity has increased, I believe, by thirty-two percent.
SecOps Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees
We were expecting to complete the compliance in a month, but I figured out Aikido Security could do it within a week for all our 13 repositories.
Co-Founder & CTO at Mango Giraffe
Time savings in daily operations come from the automatic learning and signature update reducing the need for constant manual rule management, allowing the security and network teams to spend significantly less time handling false positive application-related escalations.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The amount of attacks it protects against is immense, more than F5 Advanced WAF itself costs.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.7
Aikido Security provides quick, friendly support with practical guidance, earning high praise from users for integration and technical help.
Sentiment score
6.9
F5 Advanced WAF's customer service is highly professional and knowledgeable, but response speed and availability need improvement for some users.
Aikido Security was the easiest to use, the easiest to onboard, and the one with the most active customer support.
SecOps Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees
Their team proactively reached out after signup to ensure we were set up correctly.
Product Manager at Zidio development
Customer support is good; if you raise a query, hardly within a day, your issues get resolved.
Security Researcher at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Both response time and availability need to be improved.
Security Analyst at IBM
While they resolve issues well, the time taken for responses to non-critical issues should be shorter.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
If there is a bug, the support is usually understanding and resolves issues.
CEO at CyberApp
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Aikido Security excels in scalability, seamlessly integrating projects and teams with minimal performance issues, enhancing developer-focused security.
Sentiment score
7.5
F5 Advanced WAF is scalable, efficiently handling large traffic, praised for flexibility, and easily upgraded to meet user needs.
That kind of reliability becomes invisible when it works well, which is exactly what you want from a security tool running in your CI/CD pipelines.
Product Manager at Zidio development
Aikido Security scales well by supporting multiple projects, repositories, and development teams on a single platform.
Full Stack Developer at Sri Krishna Arts and Science
You can deploy it on your team, and if you have a large team, it works very well.
Security Researcher at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
If you need to scale up, such as moving from a lower model to a higher one, the configuration from the lower model can be migrated easily without issues.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
I can run it in HA mode or even divide the traffic volume to the number of instances that I have based on their resource sizing.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.8
Aikido Security is praised for its reliability, smooth integration, and accurate security findings with no major downtime issues.
Sentiment score
8.4
F5 Advanced WAF is highly reliable and stable, rarely facing downtime, with user ratings of 8-10 for performance.
The platform has been reliable and provides accurate security findings.
Full Stack Developer at Sri Krishna Arts and Science
It remains stable even when generating a large amount of code.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Publicis Sapient
F5 Advanced WAF has been very reliable and consistent for us; in our on-premise enterprise setup, it has been stable and predictable in day-to-day operations without any unexpected crashes or WAF-related downtime in production.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
F5 Advanced WAF is stable, and there is no doubt it is one of the best WAFs in the market.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
F5 Advanced WAF is pretty stable.
Security Solutions Architect at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek enhanced integrations, customization, and performance improvements, with focus on documentation, language support, and real-time tools.
F5 Advanced WAF needs improvements in pricing, usability, API protection, bot detection, deployment, and advanced integration features.
I would love to see a Terraform module for Aikido Security.
SecOps Engineer at a real estate/law firm with 501-1,000 employees
I had a certain object with a UUID that was being considered as a private secret key or API key, which was not the case.
Co-Founder & CTO at Mango Giraffe
Aikido Security tells you what is vulnerable, but sometimes the fix suggestions are generic.
Product Manager at Zidio development
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Overall, these are not blockers, merely enhancement opportunities, and once tuned, F5 Advanced WAF is very stable and reliable; improving usability, reporting, and onboarding would make it even more effective for larger environments.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Another improvement could be refining the bot detection to minimize false positives; it should be able to verify more granularly between legitimate and non-legitimate clients.
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers find F5 Advanced WAF's pricing high but justified in banking, with complex licensing and higher setup costs.
I used the free trial, which was sufficient for evaluating the platform and its core features.
Full Stack Developer at Sri Krishna Arts and Science
Aikido Security has a plan for $4,200 annually for up to 10 users.
Technical leader at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing is reasonable and based on the repository; they charge accordingly.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Publicis Sapient
Licensing is capacity-driven, so you need careful planning based on traffic volume and use cases, and adding features such as Bot Protection impacts costs; once licensing is clear and sized correctly, there are no surprises.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The price is affordable and satisfactory.
CEO at CyberApp
 

Valuable Features

Aikido Security offers ease of use, integration, and a unified dashboard, enhancing productivity and security with minimal false positives.
F5 Advanced WAF offers robust application security with bot protection, DDoS mitigation, and customizable threat detection for improved efficiency.
We were able to get all codebase vulnerability fixes within a week for all our 13 or 14 repositories that we had.
Co-Founder & CTO at Mango Giraffe
Security shifted left, meaning issues were caught during development rather than after deployment.
Product Manager at Zidio development
My favorite feature is the dependency vulnerability scanning because it quickly identifies the risk in third-party packages, which saves me time in finding vulnerabilities.
Full Stack Developer at Sri Krishna Arts and Science
The Advanced Attack Signature database is very strong and regularly updated, effectively blocking SQL injections, cross-site scripting, command injections, and file inclusion attacks while allowing selective enabling or disabling of signatures to avoid blocking genuine traffic.
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
Global Channel Alliances Lead at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It contains the logic of both negative and positive security combined.
CEO at CyberApp
 

Categories and Ranking

Aikido Security
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
22nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (15th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (8th), Container Security (22nd), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (8th), Static Code Analysis (8th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (6th), DevSecOps (8th), Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) (6th)
F5 Advanced WAF
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Aikido Security is 0.4%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Advanced WAF is 3.9%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
F5 Advanced WAF3.9%
Aikido Security0.4%
Other95.7%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Tarun Goswami_ - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at Zidio development
Security has shifted left and now catches vulnerabilities early in our development workflow
There are a few areas for improvement. The first is scan speed. For large repositories, initial scans can be slow. Incremental scanning helps, but full scans still take considerable time. The second thing is the false positive rate. While Auto-Triage is good, it is not perfect. Occasionally, genuine issues get filtered out and real false positives slip through. The third one is remediation guidance. Aikido Security tells you what is vulnerable, but sometimes the fix suggestions are generic. More specific, actionable remediation steps would save developer time. The fourth one is IDE integrations. It currently works best in CI/CD pipelines. A proper VS Code or JetBrains plugin for real-time scanning while coding would be a significant improvement. From a customer point of view, the following things could change. The first thing is documentation for custom rules. Aikido Security allows you to create custom scanning rules, but the documentation for this feature is surprisingly thin. I spent considerable time in community forums and with trial and error just to configure basic custom rules. Step-by-step guides with real-world examples would make this feature much more accessible. The second thing is better Slack and communication integrations. Currently, security alerts come through email and dashboard notifications, but our team lives in Slack. A more configurable Slack integration that sends contextual alerts directly to the relevant developer, not just a generic channel notification, would dramatically improve response time. The third one is historical trend reporting. While Aikido Security shows current vulnerability status well, generating historical reports showing security posture improvement over time is limited. For presenting security progress to management or stakeholders, better exportable trend reports would be very valuable.
reviewer2797602 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Security Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Granular security policies have protected critical applications and ensure safe user and admin access
Improvements could be made regarding the log information from the backend CLI. There are enhancements needed; if a request gets blocked on the TCP layer, there should be traces or data to verify which source generated these requests, including the source and port information for initiation. These data are missing from F5 Advanced WAF. Besides that, another improvement could be refining the bot detection to minimize false positives; it should be able to verify more granularly between legitimate and non-legitimate clients. Overall, I find everything else good. A wish list feature I have is for the Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to respond more promptly. Their response time needs improvement; while they do not take excessive time, it can be enhanced, especially given it is a security product.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise31
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Aikido Security?
Aikido Security could be improved by allowing us to scan the entire network, not just the applications, but also devices such as computers and servers, to have all vulnerability reports for my enti...
What is your primary use case for Aikido Security?
My main use case for Aikido Security is vulnerability scanning of our internal applications. We have a development department, and we scan those applications for vulnerabilities and other security ...
What advice do you have for others considering Aikido Security?
My advice for others looking into using Aikido Security is to take into account that they will get a robust solution with AI capabilities and a perspective aligned with a security framework, which ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?
F5 Advanced WAF is somewhat costly compared to other vendors, but it is worth the investment due to the stability it provides to the environment and infrastructure.
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
Improvements could be made regarding the log information from the backend CLI. There are enhancements needed; if a request gets blocked on the TCP layer, there should be traces or data to verify wh...
What is your primary use case for F5 Advanced WAF?
My main use case for F5 Advanced WAF is to protect external and internal applications from cyber attacks and to prevent malicious payloads and malicious data from reaching servers. Even if maliciou...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FinTech GoCardless ZIP CertifID HealthTech Dental Intelligence PE & Group Techstars Cronos Group Security Tech Human Security Tines HR Tech Simployer Recruitee Agency November Five Other Lighthouse (Hospitality Tech) Smokeball (LegalTech) Runna (B2C Tech) GEA Group (Manufacturing) Community fibre (Telecom) n8n (Software Development)
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Aikido Security vs. F5 Advanced WAF and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.